Lessons learned, promises kept: a biologist's eye view of the Genome Project.

Human Genome Project celebrated its fifth official birthday this year.This seemed like a suitable time to ask whether there has been an impact of the Project on the hearts, minds, and most important, experiments of practicing biologists.Before considering this question, it occurred to me that it would be instructive to go back to 1988, before the project began, and remember how the biology community first viewed it.At that time there were three major criticisms.The first was that the sequence of the human genome would be uninterpretable; it would sit in a huge white elephant of a data base that would lie dormant because we wouldn't know how to read the information in it.The second criticism was that it was going to be really BORING science: It would be boring to do it and the outcome would be boring.Who would be willing to do it?Given the large number of people now happily engaged in genomic research, this criticism seems, in retrospect, shortsighted.Short of people we're not.The final criticism, and probably the most serious concern, was that the project would take scarce resources away from "interesting" science--in other words, "my science."I think it's safe to say that one hears very little discussion of this kind any more.What I hear more often is exemplified by a thoughtful commentary written by R.R. West and RichardMcIntosh in December's issue of the Journal of Cell Biology: "Future biologists will be working in an environment defined by a wondrous wealth of information about genome structure.It is mindboggling to think of the ways in which our experimental lives will be changed as a result.